Rear Admiral N. Gonchar and the Soviet Plan to Hunt Polaris Submarines

By Roy Castellano · September 18, 2026

Kept secret until 2017, a 1973 TOP SECRET memorandum reveals how the USSR used fake fishing vessels to track US nuclear submarines and strip them of their second-strike capability.

The crews of the US Polaris submarine fleet spent their patrols in a state of invisible peril, unaware that the Soviet Navy had mapped their technical blindness. A single surfacing to calibrate a periscope could be the moment their invisibility ended and their destruction began.

This vulnerability is the core of a May 22, 1973, TOP SECRET memorandum from W. E. Coy, the Deputy Director for Operations who managed the CIA's clandestine service, to the Director of Central Intelligence, the head of the US intelligence community. The memorandum is a translation of an article from 1968 written by Rear Admiral N. Gonchar, a Soviet submarine specialist who had previously published critiques of the instructional abilities of young officers in the Soviet press. Gonchar’s strategy, published in Military Thought—a journal produced by the USSR Ministry of Defense, the government body that supervised the Soviet Armed Forces—was not a theoretical exercise. It was a blueprint for the location and destruction of the US nuclear deterrent.

The Periscope Depth Trap

Rear Admiral Gonchar recognized that the US submarine advantage was a matter of mathematics and celestial alignment. While the public record establishes that submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) provide a reliable second-strike option because they are difficult to track, Gonchar found the gap in that reliability. He argued that for a Polaris missile to hit its target, the submarine had to determine the "axis of the true meridian," a technical necessity that the record shows no US radionavigation system of the time could handle without the submarine ascending to periscope depth.

To fix this axis, the record states the submarine was "obliged to raise the 'STRADAC' astro-navigational periscope" or a radio sextant. This act of calibration turned a stealth asset into a surface target. Gonchar noted that the submarine must ensure the area is "free of foreign naval vessels, commercial shipping, and aircraft" to perform this observation. The record reveals a predatory irony: the very moment the US submarine became precise enough to launch a nuclear strike was the moment it became visible to the enemy.

Fishing Vessels and Explosive Signals

Gonchar did not believe in chasing submarines across the empty ocean. He advocated for "zonal defenses," essentially turning the World Ocean into a series of monitored traps. To maintain these zones, he recommended the use of "specially configured fishing vessels for submarine reconnaissance." These were not fishermen; they were sensor platforms designed to blend into the maritime background while hunting for the low-contrast radar profiles of surfacing submarines.

Once a target was spotted, the communication of that position had to be instantaneous but stealthy. The record describes the use of "relay submarines using explosive signalling in ocean sound channels to maintain communications with hunter-killer boats." This system bypassed the need for traditional radio transmissions, which are easily intercepted, instead using acoustic pulses to guide attack submarines to their prey. Gonchar’s vision was a seamless pipeline from a fake trawler’s radar to a torpedo's warhead.

A Five-Year Silence

There is a glaring discrepancy in the timeline of this intelligence. The article by Gonchar appeared in the third issue of Military Thought in 1968, yet the CIA memorandum is dated May 1973. The record shows the intelligence was handled on a "strict need-to-know basis," but it does not explain why the US government waited five years to formalize this report for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Department of State.

This delay is the most telling part of the file. In the world of signals and human intelligence, a five-year gap is an eternity. The memorandum lists other contributors to the journal, such as P. Nevzorov and A. Chabanenko, professional peers of Gonchar who wrote on the "nuclear submarine missile threat," indicating that this was a sustained institutional effort within the Soviet Navy. The fact that the CIA held the translation of a SECRET document for half a decade suggests a conflict between the value of the information and the risk of revealing how it was obtained.

The Pipeline Breach

This leads to the first critical reading of the record. The memorandum describes the source as "extremely sensitive," but the nature of the document—a full translation of a SECRET Ministry of Defense journal distributed to division commanders—suggests that the CIA did not have a single spy in a submarine pen. The desk's reading is that the "extremely sensitive source" was a systemic breach of the Soviet military's internal printing or distribution pipeline. To acquire a recurring professional journal, the US likely had access to the physical means of reproduction or a high-level clerk in the Ministry of Defense's publishing arm.

The five-year lag between 1968 and 1973 was not bureaucratic inertia. The pattern suggests a deliberate delay to protect this source from Soviet counter-intelligence "burn" patterns. If the US Navy had immediately altered its surfacing patterns or navigation protocols in 1968, the KGB would have looked at who had access to the SECRET version of Military Thought and purged them. The US accepted a five-year window of tactical vulnerability to preserve a strategic window of systemic penetration.

The Action Phase

Finally, the distribution list of the 1973 memo—including the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Assistant Chief of Naval Operations (Intelligence)—reveals that this document was the "intel" phase of a larger cycle. The memorandum provides the theory of the Soviet threat but offers no counter-measures. This is because the counter-measures were too sensitive to be included in a translation of a Soviet journal.

If this file is shaped the way it looks, the corresponding "action" phase—the US Navy's operational shift to counter zonal defense and the modification of the STRADAC/SINS protocols—is contained in a separate, higher-classification record that remains withheld. The CIA was likely already seeing the "specially configured fishing vessels" in the Atlantic and Pacific through SIGINT and ELINT; Gonchar's article provided the theoretical confirmation that these boats were part of a coordinated zonal hunt.

Those who paid for this silence were the Polaris crews who continued to surface for their meridian fixes long after the Soviets had written the manual on how to kill them. The US intelligence community traded the safety of individual hulls for the ability to read the Soviet Navy's mail, a calculation that left the deterrent's most critical vulnerability open for years while the Agency waited for the ink to dry on its cover story.